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Comment by cimmanom | Hacker News Reader

Yes.

This case is rare because it's rare for the woman to be in the position of power and the man in the subordinate position.

In any of these cases, we need to take the accusations seriously, which is what #MeToo is about.

Let me reiterate that. #MeToo isn't about women vs. men. It's about acknowledging the abuse of power to harass, humiliate, intimidate, and violate. It's about resisting the knee-jerk reactions in defense of people who abuse power. It's about fixing the dynamics that have historically caused victims to avoid speaking out because doing so is more likely to destroy the victim's career than the abuser's.

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> This case is rare because it's rare for the woman to be in the position of power and the man in the subordinate position.

This may just be due to unfortunate phrasing, but is it really rare? In this case the roles are adviser-student, and at least anecdotally it doesn’t seem that rare for an adviser-student relationship to be a female-in-power one. We just don’t hear often about abuse in such relationships—likely because it doesn’t happen as much.

(If you meant that it’s rare for the woman to be in a position of power in #metoo cases then I’d not disagree, otherwise I find that specific statement surprising and possibly misrepresenting reality in an unfortunate way.)

That aside, I’m mostly in agreement with the sentiment.

Usually when people do make studies and take a hard look at people a common attribute comes out: both men and women are human. The idea that female-in-power is less likely to abuse assumes that there is some form of biological sex or gender role difference that is so dominant that human behavior diverge. The Amygdala is not bigger or smaller depending on sex, which mostly leaves culture and gender roles to explain why we don't often hear about abuse in female-in-power relationships.

The female-in-power is less likely to abuse precisely because of fundamental biological differences. Men and woman differ significantly in their sexual behavior and sexual strategies because they have evolved through millions of years of sexual selection producing significant sexual dimorphism. We can easily observe the same behavior in other animals species, who lack any culture and gender roles.

It's quite illuminating that both you and your parent are making unsubstantiated claims (I'm not criticizing, just observing), but only your comment gets downvoted. I believe the reason is that you are expressing a forbidden idea, a taboo. "Behavioral differences based on sex? What next, are you going to compare races and then grow a narrow mustache?"

People are so afraid to find that not all humans are equal in every respect other than body that they are willing to stop, mute, censor any and all discussion on the subject and even block research into human nature rather than face the danger of having to deal with this (granted, difficult) issue.

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